Load transport is a practice with origins dating back to ancient times. For example, wheelbarrows and similar apparatuses can reduce the effort a person must exert in order to transport a load. The addition of a motor capable of driving a wheel connected to the load transport can further reduce the effort needed. However, presently, such conventional motorized load transports are inefficient and unintuitive when interpreting the type of force applied at a moment arm of the load transport.
While a motorized transport can include a variety of sensors in order to determine the orientation of the wheel and provide power assist, such apparatuses, as known to the applicant, lack the ability to differentiate between a force meant to drive the wheel (e.g., a force in the direction of transport) and a force meant to unload the transport and not drive the wheel (e.g., a force to unload the transport, such as a rotational force).
Therefore, what is needed in the art is an apparatus that can extend the moment arm of a load transport to a pivot point, so that a gyroscopically-responsive power assist can be employed to differentiate between different applied forces and drive the apparatus accordingly. What is further needed in the art is such an apparatus that is further configured, in certain implementations, to only selectively provide power assist as a function of the differentiated applied forces, so that, for instance, a load can be tipped without causing the drive motor to be energized during that operation.
It is in regard to these issues that the present invention is provided.